Glorious, in hindsight

David Starkey claims to be ëhalf in loveí with Elizabeth I and it shows in his compelling biography

12:00AM BST 09 May 2000

NO English monarch has been more kindly treated by posterity than Elizabeth I. The fates of historical interpretation have smiled on her at every turn. Within years of her death the myth of a golden reign was being fostered by men whom the accession of James I had excluded from influence, and who sought to discredit his reign through comparisons with hers.

During the 17th century the cult grew. The havoc wrought by Charles Iís and then James IIís assertions of divine-right monarchy gave a retrospective glow to the prudence and moderation of the last Tudor monarch. Advocates of a respectable middle course between absolutism and republicanism fondly recalled what they took to have been Elizabethís "limited" or "regulated" monarchy.

Besides, the Stuarts always seemed a foreign dynasty. Elizabeth was remembered as quintessentially English. And where the Stuarts connived at or even succumbed to popery, Elizabeth had been soundly Protestant. After the Revolution of 1688, when the causes of Protestantism and limited monarchy secured a joint grasp on English historical writing, Elizabeth was held up to William III and his successors as the model ruler.

Then, in the 19th century, reverence for constitutional monarchy merged with a new taste. The private excitements and sadnesses of Elizabethís life answered to a growing interest in the emotional travails of the past. Victorian historians found that the domestic passions of royalty, especially of female royalty, could reach a wide audience.

Over the 20th century three developments strengthened that appetite: the cinema; country-house tourism; and the feminist movement, which has seen in Elizabeth a solitary woman at once prevailing and suffering in a manís political world.

Her contemporaries were generally less impressed. If her monarchy was "limited" it was not through her own choice. She was as impatient with parliamentary opposition as her Stuart successors. Her court and council were as faction-ridden as theirs. Only external threats from Spain and the papacy held her regime together. In the Stuart age, when those threats receded, unity became harder to sustain.

Her advisers despaired at her whims and tantrums and at her unwillingness to think in the long term. She would not confront the gravest danger facing her subjects - the unresolved succession to the throne. The perils of invasion and civil war were averted more by luck than judgment.

None the less, luck can be made. Elizabeth, it is fair to recognise, made hers. Out of the accidents and improvisations of her reign there emerged enduring achievements.

Above all, as David Starkey emphasises, there was her religious settlement of 1559. Though the product of muddle and compromise, it established an enduring middle way between the competing zealotries that had captured royal policy under her Protestant brother Edward and her Catholic sister Mary.

I believe that Starkey, who professes to be "half in love" with Elizabeth, tilts the scales too far in her favour. Even so his book would be easy to underestimate. His treacly opening, and his subsequent resorts to adjectival extravagance and journalistic clichÈ, cater to the English taste for what Milton called "the idolising of kings". Yet those features of the book, though they will doubtless help its sales, do not run deep. Beneath them a powerful historical intelligence is at work.

Starkeyís main interest is in the young Elizabeth: in the dramatic events of her upbringing and early rule that formed the "apprenticeship" of her reign. The affections and feuds of the mid-Tudor royal family, he sees, were no mere costume drama. Great issues of state and religion were shaped by them. So, in Starkeyís judgment, was Elizabethís adult personality, even her approach to government.

His argument draws on a profound knowledge of the Tudor court: of its politics, its rituals, its topography. With a commanding sense of atmosphere and a wonderful eye for suggestive detail he conveys the likely impact on her of the execution of her mother Anne Boleyn; of her brotherís attempt to exclude her from the succession; of her wretched imprisonments under her sister, who sought to convict her - with good grounds, in Starkeyís view - of treasonous conspiracy; of the challenges to her authority early in her reign.

Those experiences taught Elizabeth watchfulness, self-reliance, and a determination to get her way. She also harboured, Starkey concedes, a "colossal" vanity. But those attributes, he shows, were balanced by others. Her strenuous education gave her moral seriousness and intellectual accomplishments. There was also - at least in comparison with her father and sister, who were so ready to shed the blood of disobedient subjects - an underlying humanity.

Starkeyís fellow-historians will envy his certainty that the often fragmentary evidence decisively favours his own interpretations and makes nonsense of other peopleís. But of the vividness and subtlety of his characterisation, and of the suspense of his narrative, there is no doubt. It is unusual to find the results of archival learning being brought so compellingly to a lay readership.